Kenneth
Turan is a noted film critic for the
Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio and Director of the Los
Angeles Times Book Prizes.

After a screening of Persuasion
in the Biltmore Bowl,
starring Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds, Mr. Turan will host
a panel discussion by writers, directors, and producers of Austen film
adaptations. We are pleased to announce that Helen Fielding,
author, screenwriter and producer of the novel and movie, Bridget Jone’s Diary, has
accepted the invitation to be on this panel. Ms. Fielding—as did Ms.
Austen before her—writes unnervingly accurate depictions of womanhood
of her era. Fielding’s new film, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,
loosely based on Persuasion
and which also stars Colin Firth as Mark Darcy—is slated to open later
this year.

Masquerade,
Assemblies
and Plays: Urban Pleasures in Jane Austen's World

Paula Byrne
is the author
of Jane Austen and the Theatre,
a book that the Times Literary Supplement described as a “definitive
and pioneering study of a wholly neglected aspect of Austen’s art.” She
has also edited the forthcoming Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Jane
Austen’s Emma. Paula has
taught in school, college and university, but is now a full-time
writer. She has published essays on a wide range of women authors and
is working on a major biography of the eighteenth-century actress,
poet, novelist, feminist and royal mistress Mary “Perdita” Robinson, a
contemporary of Jane Austen.

In Jane Austen and the
Theatre, Dr. Byrne challenges the notion that Jane Austen was
immovably
attached to village life and deeply suspicious of urban
pleasures. Her book presents quite another picture: an Austen who
enjoyed city life, who attended the theatre whenever she could and
took enormous pleasure in the theatrical scene. In her
plenary session, Dr. Byrne will examine public social space in
the theatre, and also the masquerade and assemblies in the late
Georgian era, both historically, and as presented in the literature of
the time.

The Bath of Jane Austen
and Persuasion: A City of Women Writers

Isobel Grundy

Isobel
Grundy is
University of Alberta Professor Emeritus. Dr Grundy’s areas of
research interest are women writers in English from the Medieval period
through the long eighteenth century. This expert in 18th-century
literature and women's literary history is a Chawton House Library
Trustee and Co-Investigator on the Orlando Project, a collaborative
undertaking--involving participants from universities in
Canada, the United States, England, and Australia. She is writing
the first full scholarly history of women's writing in the British
Isles.

In her plenary discussion, Dr. Grundy proposes to examine Bath
through a lens quite different from the scrutiny of earlier
observers. Writers, readers and lovers of Austen have already
paid close attention to many aspects of Bath such as its social,
medical, and cultural history. We have heard about its
balls, introductions, jaunts into the countryside. Some attention has
been paid to its commercial history with examinations of the
opportunities it provided for gaining a livelihood—not from
marriage—but from marketing, acting, publishing, or teaching.

In Persuasion, Austen makes
her heroine say that the pen has always been in men’s hands. Now, Dr.
Grundy proposes to rectify this misapprehension by relating the story
of Bath through the eyes of its women writers—how it functioned for
them as home or vacation environment, as material or fictional setting,
or as market for their work. She also will inquire
how far Austen may have been aware of Bath’s stories of women writers,
and what the currency or invisibility of their stories may have meant
to her.

Where Arts and Elegance
have fix'd their seat: Musical Culture in Regency Bath

Robert Winter

Robert
Winter, Scholar and pianist, is Director of the Center for the Digital Arts
at UCLA and
Associate Dean of the School of the Arts and Architecture. He also
holds the Presidential Chair in Music and Interactive Arts at
UCLA. Considered one of UCLA's most dynamic teachers, Dr.
Winter’s efforts have also been lauded in many print outlets. Mr.
Winter is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including a 1983
Guggenheim Fellowship and the 1985 Kindeldey Award from the American
Musicological Society for the best scholarly book on music.

Kathryn L. Shanks Libin

Kathryn L.
Shanks Libin,
musicologist and keyboardist, teaches music history and theory
courses at Vassar; her special interest is in music of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ms. Libin also
specializes in intersections between music and literature in early
Romanticism, with special emphasis on musical issues and implications
in the writings of Jane Austen. She has presented papers at several
JASNA AGM's and recently served as Music Director for JASNA's 2003
meeting in Winchester, which included planning a historically authentic
choral evensong in Winchester Cathedral.

Jane Austen
participated in the flourishing musical culture of Bath during her
residence there, both as a concertgoer and as an amateur pianist.
Her
intelligent and sensitive creation, Anne Elliot, likewise partakes of
Bath's musical offerings. A pivotal scene is the encounter
between Anne and Captain Wentworth at a concert, in a setting easily
recognizable to any Bath concertgoer of the period: Austen’s
characters “took their station by one of the fires in the octagon
room,” a familiar feature of the Upper Rooms in Bennett Street
where most of Bath’s subscription concerts took place. Local
singers
will entertain with a re-creation of this concert. The
presentations
by Dr. Winter and Dr. Libin, illustrated with slides and musical
excerpts, will offer a glimpse of Bath’s extraordinarily rich musical
culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, and will give
a
context for interpreting the concert scene in which Anne Elliot,
Captain Wentworth, Mr. Elliot and others, provide their own
counterpoint.